Politivi Blog » affiliate marketing

Hear me wax philosophical on APIs and Jabberwockies

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:40:33 +0000

Last week I had the delight of being interviewed by Mike Buechele and Trisha Lyn Fawver for their Affiliate Marketing Fanatics podcast on GeekCast Radio.

They’re currently conducting a series of interviews with some speakers at the upcoming Affiliate Summit East (8/15 through 8/17 in NYC). In the interview, we discuss my work at Adknowledge, APIs in the affiliate space, plus some Lewis Carroll trivia.

If you’d like to give it a listen, please head on over to GeekCast.fm. Let me know what you think on Twitter.

My upcoming article in Website Magazine

Christopher Calvi — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:44:11 +0000

I recently wrote an article for Website Magazine that will be published in the August issue. The article covers deal negotiation with Internet ad networks and affiliate programs, maximizing your site’s earning potential, and how to conduct the legwork to put you in good positioning for a higher revenue share from your ad provider.

The article will be out in a few weeks, so head over to their site now for a free subscription.

Website Magazine is published quarterly in both print and digital editions, and focuses exclusively on the business of running a website. It is read by over 135,000 industry professionals and has the largest audience of website owners and managers in the field.

Joel Comm’s Shopzilla Publisher Program Ebook

Christopher Calvi — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:26:53 +0000

Joel Comm just released a free ‘secrets to Shopzilla’ ebook about getting the most out of the Shopzilla Publisher Program.

If you’re thinking about using Shopzilla Publisher to monetize your site, this is a good introduction. Contrary to the title, I wouldn’t say it has any ‘secrets’, but it does have some insight.

Also, one correction: Joel mentions that the program is “contextual.” Though the ads are relevant (and as targeted as the webmaster chooses), they are not automatically drawn from the context of the page.

Jason Calacanis Affiliate Summit Keynote Video

Christopher Calvi — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 01:33:56 +0000

Jason Calacanis delivered a great keynote to kick-off Affiliate Summit West ’08 back in February. If you are in the content business on the Internet, you should watch this:

Are affiliate marketers polluting the river? Some certainly are, and hopefully this keynote inspired a few of the guilty to conduct some thoughtful introspection.

I think Calacanis’ death-of-Usenet analogy is particularly interesting. However, I also think Google will continue to wage its war against spam, and I don’t envision the spammers winning it out.

What are your thoughts?

Link Disclosure

Christopher Calvi — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 01:15:44 +0000

First, let me say the primary purpose of this blog is not to make money… it’s to share my personal thoughts and insights on numerous topics (primarily technology, politics, and American culture), and to hopefully spur some thoughtful discourse in return. For this reason, the blog as a whole can appear very disjointed, and I doubt that a very large body of readers would accumulate. If I was in this to make serious money, I’d stick to a single topic.

Nevertheless, I do include advertising on Politivi for several reasons:

It’s my job to stay current on Internet advertising and marketing trends. I work in affiliate marketing, so it is important that I stay ahead of the game. This blog (and other sites I have), allows me to be an engaged user of my own team’s product, as well as the web advertising solutions that other firms offer.
Advertising helps offset the hosting costs.
It’s fun to make a few pennies off of my work.

In addition to the normal sponsored ads/links that are clearly labeled, the content of this blog will sometimes include unmarked affiliate links (within a post’s body, as well as other places) to sites like Shopzilla, BizRate, Amazon, et al. The reasons for doing this are congruent with the reasons enumerated above. Beyond this, it’s just annoying to point out each time such a link occurs (plus you can usually see in the browser’s status bar if such a link is affiliate-encoded).

To be clear, none of the opinions expressed on this site are influenced by any advertisers. I take full responsibility for the nonsense expressed herein.

Google Slapped Your Face?

Christopher Calvi — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:08:23 +0000

Wired is reporting on the recent AdWords CPC increases that have taken a toll on arbitragers and others. The argument in favor of these increases is that it allows Google to display fewer (but more relevant) ads, thus increasing the CTR. On the flip side, some ad buyers are saying that it simply costs more now and the traffic isn’t converting to compensate for the difference.

I am curious if this increase also took effect across Google’s AdSense network?

Affiliate Summit a ‘thug conference’? I must’ve been at a different one.

Christopher Calvi — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 05:49:08 +0000

Jeremy Schoemaker ponders how long it will be until someone gets killed(!) at one of the Affiliate Summit conferences.

Pardon my language, but WTF? I was just at the last Affiliate Summit in Vegas not more than a month ago… and the closest it came to violence was when that ClickBooth guy ate the last breakfast danish on Tuesday morning.

I’m just trying to say that at no point did I feel I was in danger of being stabbed or shot by another conference attendee. In the comment stream of Jeremy’s original post, Shawn Collins debunked the hearsay. However, to go so far as to honestly call it a “thug conference,” like Jeremy did, conjures up some pretty hilarious imagery in my mind (we’re talking about web geeks here).

But now that the accusations are flying… I’m gonna have to bring my fake bulletproof vest to the upcoming Boston Affiliate Summit. Maybe I’ll even silk screen ‘Proud to be Awesome’ across the back, just to prove that I’m tough.